Florentina Holzinger is one of the most daring voices in European theatre with proposals that, given what we've seen in this Ophelia’s got talent, show influences of the radical theatre of La Fura dels Baus from a few years ago and parallels with the work of Angélica Liddell or the Brazilian Carolina Bianchi. But, in my opinion, they evoke, due to their content and dramaturgy, or rather their absence, the so-called American vaudeville theatre of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, conveniently updated. A very popular entertainment in which, one after another, musical numbers, dance, acrobatics, fakirism, illusionism, humour, with audience participation, and even biological oddities introduced by a presenter are presented. These kinds of shows were adapted for television after the Second World War.

The strategy of using a well-known title as a hook in proposals centered around popular works is legitimate, but in the case of this A Midsummer Night's Dream I believe it is, above all, an act of honesty and recognition that Àlex Rigola's dramaturgy is indebted to Shakespeare's genius and Salvador Oliva's excellent translation, even though very little remains of both. Little, but fundamental. Because what Rigola has imagined is a dynamic, jovial, daring, and at the same time, very delicate performance about love, one of the themes – perhaps the main one – of the great bard's fairy comedy.

Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill conceived The Threepenny Opera in a specific context, Victorian London, and in a determined physical space, the underbelly of Soho, inhabited by traitors, murderers, prostitutes, and exploiters. The versions we have known among us — Mario Gas's, premiered at the Romea Theatre in 1984, and Calixto Bieito's, premiered precisely at the Grec Festival in 2002 — varied the context but maintained the physical space. Above all, they maintained the characteristics that define the characters (from stage presence to costume) and the brutality of the capitalist society they describe and satirize.

The new era of Teatre del Raval under the direction of Pep Tosar and Evelyn Arévalo is based on the premise of artistic excellence and humanistic commitment. This was evident in the magnificent inaugural show about Federico García Lorca, which just ended its run last Friday and has been succeeded by L’enterrador (The Gravedigger). It is a monologue written by Gerard Vázquez and performed by Pepe Zapata that has toured much of Spain and speaks of the Francoist mass graves through the true story of Leonci Badia Navarro, better known as the gravedigger of Paterna.

The Dawn focuses on the search for origins through memory: a journey of discovery from the Spanish Civil War to the Barcelona Olympic Games that mirrors itself unashamedly in Wajdi Mouawad's great epic, Incendis (against the backdrop of the endless wars in Lebanon) which Oriol Broggi directed at the Romea theatre fourteen years ago and which, as a curiosity, was advertised with exactly the same duration of The Dawn by Jaume Viñas; three hours and forty minutes, which finally reach almost four hours.

Mario Gas is an actor, a theatre and opera director, but also a zarzuela director (in January he will restage Los gavilanes at the Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid), a genre of musical theatre for which he has great affection and passion. This is not surprising if we consider that Mario Gas was born in Montevideo during the tour (of more than a year!) of his parents' company through Latin America. Hence the title of the show La nit és blanca, muy blanca..., which he premiered at La Fàbrica with the fragment of the romance Despierta negro from La tabernera del puerto by Maestro Sorozábal, which his father sang when he was born. A declaration of intent, moreover, playing with Catalan and Spanish in a show that looks back without nostalgia, evoking those poetic voices that have been part of his life.

Peeping Tom was a dance-theater company with two co-directors working together: the Argentine Gabriela Carrizo and the Frenchman Frank Chartier. It remains a dance-theater company, but each show is commanded by one of the two creators and founders. Two years ago we saw the most theatrical version of Peeping Tom at the Sala Gran of the TNC (S 62°58’, W 60°39’) where the physical, almost acrobatic dance that characterized the company's proposals, had practically disappeared.

I don't know if Jordi Oriol, one of the most original creators of Catalan theatre, knows the work of the linguist and semiologist Ferdinand de Saussure, but his theatre in general and in particular L'últim àtom make me think so, because he uses linguistic games that alter the meaning of signs and words, illustrating the principle of linearity of the signifier and achieving surprising and humorous results. This is evident, for example, in the pronunciation (the speech) of the title of the show if we connect the two words or, more naively, if we consider the presumed and unknown actress Lara Segur, with phonetics that recall the name and surname of another well-known actress, who will not appear on stage and will be replaced by a supposed director: the actor Rubèn Ametllé. There is much more on the old green blackboard of the language teacher Mia Esteve, who plays with signifiers and signifieds and who replicates the mathematical formulas of professor Joan Carreras on another blackboard, where, talking about quantum physics and Schrödinger's cat, she posits the principle of observation as an international virus that threatens humanity. The professor and teacher are separated parents of a daughter who disappeared ten years ago, whose anniversary is approaching. She is joined by a Spanish-speaking army general, a priest, a mother in a wheelchair, a police inspector, the mother's lover, a theatre student, and a president who doesn't arrive... characters who inhabit a well-posed story but not so well resolved in the construction of a dramaturgy that is a victim of the same flexible and intuitive structure with which it is presented to us.

Carme Riera won the Sant Jordi prize (2003) with La meitat de l'ànima, an intrigue novel for which Ramon Simó and Magda Puyo have created a very fluid stage version, overcoming the difficulties inherent in a highly literary story, linked to the anti-Francoism of the fifties and sixties and anchored in public figures such as writers Albert Camus and Jorge Semprún, the anarchist and maquis Quico Sabaté, and the leader of the Lliga and former minister of Alfonso XIII Josep Bertran Musitu, who are only references for generations who already comb white hair.

The mother and son who star in this Denmark by Lluïsa Cunillé, published in 2017 (Arola Editors) but written in 2014 — when the Spanish king abdicated to evade responsibilities with the Treasury—, are the author's classic everyday characters: nameless people who drag themselves through life expecting almost nothing from it. Cunillé mirrors them without explicitly stating it in Shakespeare's great tragedy, Prince Hamlet and his mother Gertrude. A mother and son in a humble little house in Copenhagen with a bourgeois theatre sofa in the middle and flies (something smells rotten). She sleeps in front of the television and the son arrives.

Here is a play that is a challenge both for the audience and for the British playwright Ella Hickson when she was commissioned by the Almeida Theatre in London to write a play with total freedom. Hickson took it very seriously, letting out the conflicts that, as a playwright, she has to face in a British theatrical system increasingly focused on profitable proposals that have little or no impact on the real world.

The bottles of Fanta lemon on the tables at the usual refreshment offered by the Lliure after premieres were very suitable for this school-like proposal well conducted by an empathetic Olga Onrubia, chorus leader and guide of an entertaining look at Sophocles' classic but lacking the necessary pathos. It is a proposal that Andrea Jiménez's direction has populated with occurrences with little dramatic justification, such as replacing the old blind Tiresias with a girl heir to his power of prediction, reducing the character of Eurydice to nothing, or treating an Ismene dressed by her worst enemy as an actress who doesn't know what play she's in.

If wise is a person with deep and extensive knowledge about the topics they speak or write about, there is no doubt that Xavier Albertí is a wise man of theater and music. Who was director of the Grec Festival (1996-1999) and the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (2013-2021), colleague of Lluïsa Cunillé in the company La Reina de la Nit and director of small theater gems on texts by Harold Pinter, Thomas Bernhard, Josep Maria Benet i Jornet, until now had only flirted with acting, almost always in front of a piano, or cross-dressed as the Polish director Wanda Pitrowska for the premiere of L’aplec del Remei, by Josep Anselm Clavé in 2016 at the TNC, but had never achieved such prominence as in this Beethoven with a clear enough title.

It is very unusual for the great Greek classics to appear on the Barcelona theatre scene (the last one, I think, was Èdip directed by Oriol Broggi at the Romea with Julio Manrique in the lead role in 2018).'Èdip directed by Oriol Broggi at the Romea with Julio Manrique in the lead role in 2018). Hence the expectation surrounding Carlota Subirós's proposal, which brings together the three tragedies of Sophocles in a single performance in the natural order of events and not of writing, since Èdip a Colonos, the least performed worldwide, is the last but fits perfectly between the two most frequently staged: Èdip rei and Antígona. It fits but its lesser interest and lack of theatricality compared to the magnificent impact of the other two is clear.

Stuntmen, otherwise called specialists or action doubles, are those performers who either substitute for the protagonists in dangerous scenes or are cinematic victims of the violence exerted upon them. Of violence goes this supposed opera by Nao Albet and Marcel Borràs

Cabosanroque's theatre (Laia Torrents and Roger Aixut) has eluded theatrical conventions by moving towards visual and sonic proposals that are very difficult to classify. A performative theatre that develops musicovisual artefacts playing with tempos and metrics, with sound and silence in fully contemporary scores and scenic spaces of strong plasticity. In their creative territory there is a deliberate absence of literature, although they have made shows about Verdaguer, Rodoreda and Brossa with little human presence. This changes in Mil tres, say cheese, a kind of stimulating contemporary opera based on the character of Don Juan and the music of Mozart.

Education is not only one of the main topics of public policies, subject to too constant changes that do not facilitate the functioning of schools and end up negatively influencing children's academic results. It is also a troubling problem that all parents face when they have to decide where and how to guide their sons' or daughters' education with the hope that whoever gets it right guesses it.

The historical novel or false biography of the Roman emperor Hadrian is the best-known and most-read book by the Belgian writer Marguerite Yourcenar. The novel was adapted for the stage by the Italian director Maurizio Scaparro in 1989 and a few years later it was seen in the Castilian version by Julio Cortázar, also directed by Scaparro, at the Teatre Grec in Barcelona. Now the show returns to the stage with a dramatization by Brenda Escobedo and with the fantastic starring role of Lluís Homar, for whom the part is a perfect fit. Hadrian/Yourcenar's reflections on politics, wars, beauty, and death compose a human fresco that the virtuous Lluís Homar conveys, combining delicacy with depth, confidence with tender melancholy. 

You have to warm up before you start. And if you're warming up, you'd better keep warming up because if you stop, you'll have to start all over again. And that's always difficult. So says the flamenco dancer Rocío Molina, and that's why, while the audience sits in their seats and chats away, she exercises on a mat in the middle of the empty stage. And that's why, after two hours of a high-heeled spectacle, after the greeting from the rest of the company and a resounding applause with the entire audience on their feet and reluctant to leave, she will continue tapping her heels while the music plays.Achilipú by Dolores Vargas, La Terremoto.

Sol Picó closes a chapter with her first show in the Sala Gran of the Teatre Nacional. A show that is a farewell or, as she says, a transformation. And it arrives with a personal apocalypse full of strength, dedication, and magnificent choreography.